An Alternative College Admissions System

I have a long post about Ron Unz’s essay, but I kept on getting bogged down in too much detail, and it’s five days later. So I decided instead to propose an alternative to his alternative admissions process:

Since essays, personal statements, lists of extracurricular achievements and so many other uniquely complex and time-consuming elements of the American admissions process would no longer exist, students could easily apply to long lists of possible colleges, ranking them in order of personal preference. Meanwhile, the colleges themselves could dispense with nearly their entire admissions staff, since the only remaining part of the admissions process would be determining the academic ranking of the tiny fraction of top applicants, which could be performed quickly and easily. Harvard currently receives almost 35,000 applications, which must each be individually read and evaluated in a massive undertaking, but applying a crude automatic filter of grades and test scores would easily winnow these down to the 1,000 plausible candidates for those 300 Inner Ring slots, allowing a careful evaluation of those highest-performing students on pure academic grounds.

Note to Mr. Unz: Pure academic grounds simply can’t include grades. Besides, your method preserves the exclusivity of the top schools without requiring them to give up anything in return. Is there no way for any other school to break through, if the same group of schools get the top candidates?

So here’s my alternative.

Admissions:

• All students must apply for consideration in one of five categories: Academic, Specialist (artist, language study, musician, actor what have you), Sports, Foreign National, and Development (people who pay a lot of money, legacy, disabled students who are asking for consideration).

• Public colleges and universities must limit their admissions to non-remedial, citizen students. Practically, this means community college students at 450 per SAT section, lower tier universities at 550 per section, and top-tier universities to 600 per section. Or equivalent ACT scores. Or another test that hasn’t been invented yet. We need a more competitive market in tests; right now most test requirements should include the phrase “and so shovel still more taxpayer millions into the College Board’s pockets”. (What, you didn’t know how much federal money goes to pay AP fees?)

• All admissions data is public information: test scores, biographical data, application/admit category (see above). Average SAT scores per university for white legacies, for Asians for blacks, for Hispanics, for Chinese, for whites from West Virginia, for black athletes, for Asian lacrosse players, whatever.

• Employers have access (with permission) to college application data. It’s time to test Griggs.

• Either universities pay for test score reports or they end admissions fees. Both would be nice.

Candidate Biography/History:

• In: Parental education, parental income, race.

• Out: Everything else, including GPA, transcripts, internships, what they did on summer vacation, jobs, favorite books, and admissions essay.

• Specialist and Sports candidates have a separate portfolio. Presumably, development legacy candidates are given an amount to fill in on their checks.

Testing, all four year colleges (public or private):

• SAT/ACT/alternate test to be named later

• Four Subject Tests: Math 2c, English Lit, US History, Choice of Science.

• New test series: Students sit for three 2-essay tests: English lit/composition, current affairs/history, and science/math. Prompts vary—say, student could get either free response or the AP DBQ, or some other form of essay question. Essays are graded on two 10-point scales, one for quality of response, one for mechanics and writing quality.

• Universities can require other tests from Specialists.

That’s it. Students fill out a brief form, take the tests, and select the schools to get the scores.

Anticipated questions:

1. What, no elimination of legacies or affirmative action?

   Universities blatantly do an end run about any attempt to curb either practice. My method requires absolute transparency, which will be much more useful. Besides, giving prospective employers access to college admissions data will once and for all prove whether elitist universities trump actual abilities: will employers prefer a black Harvard grad with 1800 SAT and an average 500 Subject test score, or a white state college grad with a 2200 SAT and average Subject test scores of 750?

2. What, no foreign language test requirement?

   Foreign language tests should be reserved for students who are applying in the Specialist category for their facility in learning non-native languages. Why, you ask? Here’s the number and score distribution of all SAT Subject foreign language testers. Here’s the number and score distribution of all SAT Subject foreign language testers who studied for 2-4 years—mostly, but not all, non-native speakers of the foreign language. Can anyone tell me why we’re giving a gimmee to Hispanics, Chinese, and Koreans? Bryan Caplan has his head stuffed up his posterior on immigration, but he’s dead on about foreign language study in high school. Foreign language testing in this country has become a joke. It needs to stop.

3. Why no admissions essay?

   Oh, come on. Public universities use them as yet another workaround state affirmative action bans. The Chinese and the rich have someone else write the essays. Sophomoric admissions directors pick their favorite sob stories and bias the results. The essay tests will be better. No doubt, the Asians will figure out how to cram for them, but it’ll be a lot tougher and cost them a lot more money. Plus, it will really hurt foreign admissions.

4. Again. Why aren’t you banning affirmative action?
   If the transparency argument doesn’t do it for you, then I offer up my requirement of a public university SAT/ACT/other test score basement. As elite colleges have become ever more competitive and expensive, state schools should be an affordable alternative that still provide a good education. Instead, they’re drowning under a flood of unqualified, often near-illiterate, certainly innumerate students. Getting out of a decent state school usually requires 5-6 years now, simply because the schedule is too crowded with remedial classes. Lower division educational quality is often abysmal because the universities are highly committed to graduate anyone who does manage to escape remediation, even if they can’t factor a quadratic or read at an 8th grade level. So actually qualified students mark time and wait for openings until they get to upper level courses, where things are a bit better.

   State schools will improve dramatically with those score basements. They might not have the prestige, but qualified students can choose a state school instead of drowning in debt and know their peers will be equally competent and the needs of qualified students won’t be subordinated to an ideological obsession with equal access.

   Great idea, you say, but how does this affect affirmative action? Well, only 6% of African Americans get over 600, 23% over 500, and barely 40% over 450 on any section of the SAT. (Cite). As is always the case, Hispanics are just a bit better, but not much. An SAT/ACT limit will annihilate public universities’ ability to commit affirmative action; URMs with scores above 600 will be heavily courted by the privates.

   Given that most public universities have a remedial score requirement around the level I’m proposing, they will be hard pressed to argue that the test basement isn’t valid. Students can simply go to community college until they can achieve the necessary score. And if they can’t hit 450 per test, they shouldn’t be going to college at all. Hopefully, that will be enough for the inevitable disparate impact lawsuit.

5. What’s your problem with grades?
   I’ve written before about the problem with grades on the URM side of things (The Problem with Fraudulent Grades, Homework and Grades, and a bit in The Parental Diversity Dilemma). But I haven’t written directly on the issues with grades and Asians.

   Yes, I understand that Asians, as a group (but specifically Chinese, Koreans, and Indians), outperform whites on tests. But the overrepresentation of Asians in colleges is explained more by their dominance in GPA than it is test scores. And that’s harder to fix. It’s easy enough to tell white kids with high test scores to go to test prep and maximize their scores, but by junior year, the GPA damage has been done. Public universities use grades as a workaround for affirmative action. Private universities—and here, I’m just guessing, but it’s a reasonable guess—have one grade standard for “development” and affirmative action but then, in order to keep their overall numbers up, they need extraordinary high GPAs from the students who don’t fall into their discount categories.

   And so, grades become phenomenally important to admissions. Little room for, say, the idiosyncratic white boy who scores 2250/34 on the SAT/ACT, scored 4s and 5s in 7 AP tests, got 780, 730, and 690 on the US History, English Lit, and Math 2c, but whose weighted GPA is a 3.8, unless he’s a legacy. Lots of room for kids with 4.2 GPAs, regardless of their AP scores, and here, Asians win over whites in a huge way.

   So just raise the GPA, you say. White parents need to raise their expectations for their own kids. Unless the white kid is ruthlessly driven and competitive on his own volition, parental pressure as a means of raising his or her grades to the degree needed to compete with Asians is a non-starter. Amy Chua isn’t kidding. If a white parent tried to drive her kid the way Amy Chua did hers, the kid would end up in therapy, and the therapist would make the parent stop. Asian parenting techniques are abusive in white people world. Full stop. (What disgusts me most about Chua’s story is not her own behavior, as she doesn’t know any better, but that her white husband stood by and let her abuse her daughters. But then, I’m a white parent.) Not only does this difference between white and Asian cultural expectations lead to lower GPAs for whites, but smart white kids with B averages are then denied access to AP classes (in most Asian schools, access to AP is strictly limited by GPA), which put even a lower ceiling on their GPA.

   And finally, understand that those Asian good grades do not necessarily translate to a well-educated student. Here I offer anecdata, but it’s a lot of anecdata. As my primary second job, I teach enrichment at a private educational company (aka, an Asian cram school), which over seven years adds up to a lot of Asian high school students. I love them. They’re great kids. But my experience has taught me to question any straightforward comparison between white and Asian academic credentials. All of my enrichment kids, as sophomores, are taking honors English and pre-calc. Maybe 10% of them can reliably read a complex text and offer an interesting or informed analysis without referring to Wikipedia and repeating verbatim what they read there, and in seven years and probably 300 kids I have never once had a student who could explain the derivation of the quadratic formula (that is, the generalized case for completing the square). I also teach an AP US History prep course every year, at two different locations, to a dozen students per class. All but a few kids each year will have taken six months of APUSH by the time my class starts, and fewer than a quarter of them have ever known who wrote the Federalist papers, or the most important achievement of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, when the class begins. Very few of them can even make a stab at naming the presidents in order, or even identify any of the “forgettable” presidents. These are kids attending public schools with some of the highest SAT averages in the country, more than a few of them topping out at 2400.

   In comparison, I’ve tutored and taught (as a public school teacher and a tutor) a lot of bright white kids. Their awareness and retention of their own education, including the above benchmark questions, is far superior, on average. Many white soulless swotters and creative inquisitive Korean eccentrics exist to skew the stereotype. But the betting goes the other way.

   Grades are lies at the bottom end of the scale and culturally skewed beyond all recognition to reality at the top end. Unless or until we move to a system in which grades are taken out of teachers’ hands and determined by outside standardized tests, grades must be eliminated from any truly meritocratic admissions process. End rant.

   I’ve been focusing on whites and Asians regarding concerns at the top end of the GPA problem, but: 1) bright Hispanic and black kids are far more like white kids than Asians, but they are rarer and are going to write their own tickets regardless; 2) just as Asian test performance may overstate their abilities, black test performance may understate their abilities because the tests focus too much on abstraction and generalized situations—and yes, I know that thus far, SAT scores show black underperformance. It’s just a hunch I have. That’s another reason I want to see a more competitive test market, to determine if the bottom half of the ability spectrum is tested accurately.

So there’s my plan. I think it’s preferable to Unz’s in that it allows universities more agency and the public more transparency. They shouldn’t be bound to a lottery. But they also shouldn’t be allowed to lie or fudge about their admissions process. Public universities shouldn’t be allowed to pursue their ideological romanticisms at taxpayer expense.

I also think my plan, or something like it, allows excellent students to thrive in any number of environments, rather than being forced to go into debt to prove they are worthy of one of the few slots an elite campus holds open after the mandatory legacy, athletics, diversity, and foreign student spots are all filled in. We really need to get control of our public university system again and stop using these schools to pretend that any illiterate can get a college degree if he or she just jumps through enough hoops.

The Parental “Diversity” Dilemma

Ah, the eduformers have discovered the progressive charter:

Fueled by a confluence of interests among urban parents, progressive educators, and school reform refugees, a small but growing handful of diverse charter schools like Capital City has sprouted up in big cities over the past decade…These schools attract children of city workers, project residents, New York Times reporters, and government officials, and simultaneously attempt to address the weaknesses of “no-excuses” charter schools, progressive education, and school segregation: “Usually in the places that are all about accountability it doesn’t feel like there is a ton of learning going on as the primary outcome,” says Josh Densen, a former KIPP teacher who is set to open Bricolage Academy next year. “In schools where it’s all about learning, discovery, and projects and teamwork, there seems to me to be an absence of or a reluctance to have any kind of accountability.”

Russo, who’s a pretty even-handed education reporter, touches delicately and indirectly on the cause for the attention: progressive, “diverse” charters spring up in “diverse” environments precisely because the environments are diverse.

Look at the history of most progressive charters and you’ll find they are initiated by white people who fit into one or more of the following categories:

• Unnerved by the high percentage of low-achieving, low-income kids at their neighborhood school.
• Unwilling to risk the lottery system for the good schools in their district.
• Unable to afford private school, or a house in a homogenous suburb.
• Unsure their kids are going to be able to compete with the top kids in their neighborhood school (particularly in high school)
• Unhappy with the public school’s treatment of their idiosyncratic little snowflake.

These are people who would move to homogeneous environments, but can’t.

So a bunch of well-off but not super-rich white folks* who don’t want to or can’t move and don’t want to or can’t pay for private school live in a school district in which low-income black/Hispanic kids must be a part of their kids’ school environment. This is not optimal. However, if they can create a charter school and require a bunch of commitments, they can skim the cream off of this population, minimize the impact of low ability kids on their own child’s education, get their kids something close to straight As with far less work than they’d have to do in a public school, congratulate themselves on their tolerance and dedication to diversity, and all for less than the cost of a mid-tier private school. Such a deal.

Unlike low-achieving, majority URM charters, which are generally funded with billionaire grant money or for-profit charters, progressive charters are normally started by parents who are willing to fork out $10K or so apiece to get a charter school off the ground for their kids. Then, once they’ve got seed money, off they go in search of a reasonable amount of low income URM kids.

This kicks off a big hooha with the local school district. First, the charter will never be as “diverse” as the local school district. It will always run considerably behind in URMs. Then, the local school districts will accuse the charter of creaming just the motivated students, of URM attrition, of creating rules and expectations that are tough for the low-income (read Hispanic/black) parents to follow. Then there’s the yearly squabble as the local school district points out that the charters are pulling the public schools’ top achieving low income Hispanic/African American kids whilst leaving behind low incentive kids, special ed kids, English language learners, thus lowering the district school scores, while the charters congratulate themselves for their diversity, tolerance, humanity, generosity and high test scores. The local school district will often reject the charter’s extension, only to be overridden by lawsuits or the state. All done ostensibly in the name of good intentions and diversity, all done actually in the name of minimizing their own kids’ exposure to the lower achieving, poorly behaved low income blacks and Hispanics. (Of course, if the charter’s in a rich enough district, then they don’t even have to worry about finding URMs.)

Am I painting this in the worst possible light? Probably, but it’s not all that pretty. Using taxpayer dollars for upscale liberals (they are, usually, liberals) who don’t want their kids in the overly “diverse” local schools or have a little snowflake who just isn’t good enough to compete in a more competitive public school, gaming the system and using their own dollars to bootstrap a plan to qualify for state and federal dollars? If you’re going to do it, then own it. We can argue about whether or not it’s appropriate to create charters for entirely low income populations, schools that skim the motivated kids without any disabilities or sped problems from the local public schools overloaded with all that and more and then take those kids and mercilessly beat information into them in the hopes of moving them to a better-educated life and middle class jobs. But at least, there, we are working with kids who have no other options, who are being funded largely by grants from billionaires who want to pat themselves on the back for helping the little people.

None of this means that the teachers aren’t hardworking and dedicated and that some low income kids are getting a much safer education than they otherwise would. (In high school, however, it does mean that the kids are all getting much, much better grades than they would be getting in their local comprehensive high schools, which gives them a huge advantage in college admissions.)

The eduformers have started to notice these progressive, “diverse” charters, as well as gentrifying urban schools, which spring from the same motivations. Mike Petrilli** has a book out (What, you didn’t know? You must not be on his Twitter feed.) celebrating the parents who seek out this choice for their kids, despite their concerns about performance and their own little snowflakes’ educations. Why, Petrilli himself suffered through the “diverse schools dilemma”. His own local school in Takoma Park had a student body in which THIRTY FIVE PERCENT of the students qualified for free lunch! I mean, that school almost qualified for Title I! Oh, the humanity. So you can see why Petrilli felt the need to write a book celebrating the parents who brave these schools full of the great illiterate unwashed, and showing them how to find schools that only looked bad on the outside, but weren’t, you know, actually bad.

In fairness, Petrilli, like all educational policy folks, is fixated on elementary and middle schools, which are far more segregated than high schools. So 35% probably seems like a rilly rilly high number to him. But I can list at least five high schools in my general vicinity that have are 65% free-reduced lunch and 65% ELL (mostly Hispanic) with a 30% population of white students, ranging from working class to well-off, a situation that’s becoming increasingly common in many suburbs. So Petrilli’s intro has already spotlighted him as a dilettante. I mean, gosh. 35%!!!

But Petrilli as a eduform policy wonk has been focused on pulling in whites to the reform movement for a while—in fact, I’m deeply skeptical that he ever really researched the issue for his own kids, given how neatly this book ties in with his clear policy goals. In his summary of takeaways from the 2012 election, #1 on his list is “don’t piss off the suburbs”. (And of course, Petrilli didn’t take any of his own advice, running away from the scarily “diverse” Takoma Park in favor of uprooting his family to an expensive house in the suburbs and sending his kids to lily white Wood Acres Elementary, a school he tsks tsks in the intro for being over 90% white. Really, who hands out book deals to people like this?)

So call me uncharitable, but I figure Petrilli and other eduformers are pushing “diversity” as a means of gently tempting house-poor or other economically stretched white folks into seeking out charters in order to further undercut public schools, while also reassuring the suburbs that the reform movement won’t drill and kill their kids to test heaven.

Of course, the real “dilemma” is one I wrote about earlier:

….why are charter schools growing like weeds?

I offer this up as opinion/assertion, without a lot of evidence to back me: most parents know intuitively that bad teachers aren’t a huge problem. What they care about, from top to bottom of the income scale, is environment. Suburban white parents don’t want poor black and Hispanic kids around. Poor black and Hispanic parents don’t want bad kids around. (Yes, this means suburban parents see poor kids as mostly bad kids.) Asian parents don’t want white kids around, much less black or Hispanic….So charters become a way for parents to sculpt their school environments. White parents stuck in majority/minority districts start progressive charters that brag about their minority population but are really a way to keep the brown kids limited to the well-behaved ones. Low income black and Hispanic parents want safe schools. Many of them apply for charter school lotteries because they know charters can kick out the “bad kids” without fear of lawsuits. But they still blame the “bad kids”, not the teachers, which is why they might send their kids to charter schools while still ejecting Adrian Fenty for Michelle Rhee’s sins.

As I’ve mentioned before, education reformers are now pushing suburban charters with strong academic focus, which are nothing more than tracking for parents who can’t get their public schools to do it for them.

And so the dilemma Petrilli and others write about involving both progressive charters and “gentrifying” public schools: how can white middle to upper class parents who can no longer afford to move to a homogeneous district sculpt the schools they want while minimizing the impact of the undesirable students?

Clearly, step one is for the parents to publicly congratulate themselves. They’re not avoiding diversity, they’re seeking it out! (They just don’t mention the part about controlling it.)

And then, wait patiently for step two: Eventually, all but the best low income students will either behave badly enough or get tired of the rules and leave the charter schools for the required-to-take-them comprehensives, and eventually, gentrification will be complete and all the low income students, good and bad, will go off to an exurb somewhere.

So all they have to do is cope until that happy day, and avoid the lawsuits. Tiptoe tentatively around the cultural issues in the meantime. If you want to worry, worry that you bet on the wrong neighborhood and that gentrification won’t take hold.

That’s the diversity dilemma, in a nut shell: a white parents strategy to minimize the impact of low income low ability students on their kids without the expense of a private school or a new house. If the economy or the housing market picks up, expect the trend to fade. Sorry, eduformers, but by and large, white folks like big high schools and full-service middle schools.

Anyway. Russo touches on another point directly: the upper middle class white funded charters are, in almost every case, progressive. They hire their teachers from straight from top-ranked ed schools, all of them thoroughly steeped in the tea of social justice, heterogeneous classrooms, complex instruction, and Freire. Teachers dedicated to closing the achievement gap not by drill and kill, but by shrinking the range by pulling the top-end in sharply. Not, to put it mildly, teachers who will provide an academically rigorous education.

What this means in practice is that progressive charters (and, probably, the gentrified publics) do not have a high-achieving white population–particularly at the high school level. The parents who start progressive charters are more likely to have idiosyncratic kids who would be labelled weird in their public school. Others, like the parents of Emily Jones in Waiting for Superman, are worried their kids wouldn’t track into the top group in their local suburban high school, and thus be stuck with the lower achieving kids. Still others just know their kids won’t work terribly hard and will get weaker grades at the local high school than they would at a progressive charter where they’d be the top students (and where, of course, they will be donating quite a bit of money for that sort of consideration). Parents with high achievers are either going to seek out academic charters (which are rare) or leave their kids in the comprehensive high school, where they are able to compete and perform at the top level.

You can see this reality reflected in the research on charter schools, with one of its key findings: Study charter schools’ impacts on student achievement were inversely related to students’ income levels.

Yep. Drill and kill works great for low ability kids, but heterogeneous complex instruction is a lousy way to teach a mixed ability classroom without many high achievers.

But that’s predictable, isn’t it? After all, progressive charters are a hybrid of the worst of both sides of the education debate. Progressive instruction and goals, social justice crap given full rein, all in an organizational structure designed to pull off exactly the sort of kids who wouldn’t benefit from it, courtesy of the reform movement.

*****************

* I know many nice parents who send their kids to charters. I get it. But stripped of all the rationalizations, this is what’s left.

**I am normally a middling fan of Petrilli. He does come off a bit like a hyper-enthusiastic, gormless Richie Cunningham. But the minute he decided to move his family out to the homogenous zone, he should have dropped the book deal.

Algebra Terrors

A day or so before the school year began, I went to an empty classroom that had a supply cabinet. This classroom was way better than mine. It was 3 or 4 feet wider, had shelving and a smart board. Now I didn’t care much about the smart board, but all smartboards have document cameras, which my room does not.

“Hey. This is a great room. Who gets it?”

“I guess the other new teacher.”

“When’s he coming?”

“I don’t think he’s even hired yet. You know, you should ask for this room! You’re here first.”

“Yeah, I think I will. It can’t hurt.”

So off I went to find an administrator, and the first one I I ran into was the AVP of discipline and scheduling. (As a sidenote, the conversation recorded below is the one of only two I’ve ever had with him.)

“Hi. Please don’t view this as a complaint of any sort, but I really like to teach with document cameras, and I notice that room 1170E has a smartboard. Hank (not his real name) suggested I ask if I could switch rooms?”

“To 1170E? Oh, yes, that’s for Ramon. I suppose I could switch rooms, but we’d need to change schedules as well. You see, we got the Promethean smartboard funding as part of our algebra initiative, and we committed to give those boards to teachers teaching Algebra I at least 60% of the time. If you’re interested….”

You know in Terminator 2, when Linda Hamilton has just finally broken out of her padded cell, broken Earl Boen’s arm, beaten the crap out of three security guards and is waiting for the elevator? Freedom is there, baby. She can taste it. She can get her son, escape to Mexico, stop the machines, save the world. All she needs is the ding of the elevator door.

Ding!

….and out of the elevator steps

Algebra I Arnold

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooo!
“I was told that you had expressed a strong preference to teach geometry and intermediate algebra. But I’m always happy to find interested algebra I teachers….”

“No, no, sir, no really. It’s fine. I do have a very strong preference to teach geometry and intermediate algebra, you were correctly informed, and I am happy with my current room. It’s fantastic. I can deal without a camera, it’s fine.”

“You’re sure?” Clearly, this man is an evil sadist. “You really do seem to like the document camera, and we prefer that the rooms go to teachers who will use them…”

No! No! I’ll stop! The machines can win! Take my son! Just don’t make me go back!!!

****************************************

It was just a bad scare. I’m teaching geometry and algebra 2. Well, Math Support, but even though the kids are weaker, I’d rather teach Math Support than Algebra I.

Math teachers think this story is very funny.

In retrospect, my second year of teaching was my most brutal, thanks to my schedule of all algebra I, all the time. I learned a lot. I never want to go back. Oh, sure, I’d like to teach one class of Algebra I, particularly to see if my data modeling lessons they work as well in algebra I as algebra II. But I do not want to be an “algebra I specialist”, and never, ever, EVER want to devote anything more than a class a year to algebra I. I’ve said it many times, but I’m always ready to bore folks: high school algebra I classes should convince anyone—from loopy liberal progressive to anti-teacher union tenure hating eduformer—that our educational policy is twisted and broken beyond all recovery.

So why bring it up now? Because until I saw this article, I’d forgotten the very worst part: A Double Dose of Algebra (ht: Joanne Jacobs).

Yes, I didn’t just teach straight algebra I classes. I taught a double class of Algebra Intervention. Let’s switch T2 characters for just a moment, shall we?

This is what happens when I’m reminded of that intervention class without time to prepare myself.

What is Algebra Intervention, or “double dose algebra”? Well, it’s this brilliant strategy of identifying kids who are really weak in math and increasing their hours of torture.

The best study of this approach, by Takako Nomi and Elaine Allensworth, examined the short-term impact of such a policy in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), where double-dose algebra was implemented in 2003. …. Nomi and Allensworth reported no improvement in 9th-grade algebra failure rates as a result of this intervention, a disappointing result for CPS. The time frame of their study did not, however, allow them to explore longer-run outcomes of even greater importance to students, parents, and policymakers. (emphasis mine)

So double dose algebra didn’t work. Did that stop them? Hahahahah! Of course not! They just commissioned another study! One that would allow them to explore “outcomes of even greater importance” to students, like “will I make an extra $50,000 a year to compensate me for the time I spent in this tortuous hell?”

Using data that track students from 8th grade through college enrollment, we analyze the effect of this innovative policy by comparing the outcomes for students just above and just below the double-dose threshold. These two groups of students are nearly identical in terms of academic skills and other characteristics, but differ in the extent to which they were exposed to this new approach to algebra. Comparing the two groups thus provides unusually rigorous evidence on the policy’s impact.

Wait. You checked the kids just below and just above the threshold? So you only compared the strongest intervention students with the weakest regular students? Well, golly. Did you, perchance, check how the weakest regular students did compared to the weakest intervention students? Was it substantially different from the gap between the strongest intervention and weakest intervention?

The benefits of double-dose algebra were largest for students with decent math skills” but below-average reading skills, perhaps because the intervention focused on written expression of mathematical concepts.

Guys, half of all regular high school algebra students can’t add fractions or work with negative numbers—that is, they do not have decent math skills. So what the hell is relevant about progress made by intervention students with “decent math skills”?

With the new policy, CPS offered teachers of double-dose algebra two specific curricula called Agile Mind and Cognitive Tutor, stand-alone lesson plans they could use, and three professional development workshops each year, where teachers were given suggestions about how to take advantage of the extra instructional time.

Eight days of PD. EIGHT DAYS! In three plus years of teaching, I’ve taken 1.5 days off for being sick. In one year of teaching algebra and algebra intervention, I was required to leave the classroom for 8 days. The PD was utterly useless. The lunches with the other math teachers, good—lots of conversations, sharing of lessons, venting, and so on. We would do better to just give us money and an extra half hour every month for lunch.

CPS also strongly advised schools to schedule their algebra support courses in three specific ways. First, double-dose algebra students should have the same teacher for their two periods of algebra. Second, the two algebra periods should be offered consecutively. Third, double-dose students should take the algebra support class with the same students who are in their regular algebra class. Most schools followed these recommendations in the initial year. In the second year, schools began to object to the scheduling difficulties of assigning the same teacher to both periods, so CPS removed that recommendation.

It wasn’t just the schools that objected, I’m betting. I taught intervention the first year it was offered by the school. Of the three intervention teachers, one (a TFAer) turned in her resignation in January purely because she felt beaten down by intervention. Another teacher, an algebra specialist, a near-phlegmatically calm Type B, burst into tears when she met with the principal to make absolutely sure she wasn’t given an intervention class the next year.

I was the third. I never complained. I was under continual pressure because I wouldn’t tolerate three kids who were deliberately disrupting the class. The administration hinted I was racist, that I was exaggerating their behavior, and only relented on the pressure when my induction adviser witnessed a middling incident of blatant misbehavior and blew a gasket when the AVP of discipline shrugged it off until he learned that she’d seen it. Admin got a long letter from her and started to make the kids’ lives hell.

The following year, the school dropped the requirement for consecutive periods and allowed two teachers to split the course, rather than requiring the same teacher to do both sections. That same year, the intervention teachers got called into a room by the district and were given a blistering come to jesus meeting in which they were informed that their pass rates better go way, way up until they were as good as the pass rates from last year, which were clearly a goal to be attained. Of course, that last year, when they were dumping all that pressure on me, they never said “Yeah, too many referrals but hey, your pass rate is awesome. You’re only failing two kids, who never show up. Great job!”

This year, the school has dropped the requirement that the students all be in the same class. Hey. That sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

The pressure on the teachers is tremendous. So the schools try to find a way to pay lip service to the method—we’re offering intervention for our weak students!—without all their teachers quitting on them simultaneously. Intervention is brutal on teachers.

The recommendation that students take the two classes with the same set of peers increased tracking by skill level. All of these factors were likely to, if anything, improve student outcomes. We will also show, however, that the increased tracking by skill placed double-dose students among substantially lower-skilled classmates than non-double-dose students, which could have hurt student outcomes.

In addition to the strain on teachers, intervention is a huge hassle for administration and has an unintended consequence that escapes the notice of people who haven’t talked to an AVP responsible for the master schedule. But the reality is that a group of kids who must take two classes back to back end up taking most, if not all, of their classes together.

Say a school has 10 freshmen English classes but only three of them are double block remedial and (please note, this will come up again) many of the kids who take double block algebra also require double block English. The intervention freshmen are in periods 3 and 4 for algebra intervention, and the only other double block English class they can take is 5 and 6, leaving periods 1 and 2 open. Only one freshman PE class available in period 1, so science (bio or general) has to go in period 2. All done. So all the kids in algebra intervention periods 3 and 4 who are also in double block English take all their classes together. For every intervention class, some 20-30 underachieving, low incentive kids are moving through their entire day together, in non-remedial and remedial classes both. Of course, since most intervention kids are weak in all their subjects, this means that their classes have a disproportionately high number of low achievers—all of whom spend their entire day together, socializing. Or planning ways to wreak havoc. The troublemakers in my class arranged signals that they would use to disrupt classes—all their classes. They’d pick a code word, and whenever the teacher said that word, they’d all start laughing loudly, or squeaking their shoes, or sneezing.

I’m a big fan of tracking. I am vehemently opposed to taking a group of low achieving kids who are already buddies, already with next to no investment in school, already really annoyed at having to take a double dose of math—and give them every single class together, so they can reinforce each other in noncompliance and have an entire school day to socialize.

And then this section, which caused more flashbacks:

Overall, 55 percent of CPS students scored below the 50th percentile and thus should have been assigned to double-dose algebra, but only 42 percent were actually assigned to the support class. In addition, some students took double-dose algebra, even though they scored above the cutoff on the exam.

You’re thinking, wait. Some of the weak kids didn’t get intervention, and some of the strong kids did? That’s a weird fluke, isn’t it?

And so, another anecdote.

My strongest intervention kids had taken Algebra I the year before. Each of these six kids had scored higher on their state test than my average score for all my non-intervention algebra students. Yes, you read that right. Six of my intervention kids were good enough for the top half of my non-intervention algebra class. Not just better than my worst. Better than HALF the 100 students in my non-intervention classes. Two of them had actually achieved Basic on the previous year’s test. I got them to bring in their test scores and show them to the AVP of Instruction, demanding they be put into normal algebra (leaving me out of it, of course). One of them was put into my regular algebra class, and got an A-. The other four missed Basic by just a few points and despite my asking on their behalf, were required to take intervention. This despite the fact that I had over a dozen non-intervention freshmen who’d scored Below Basic or Far Below Basic. None of it mattered.

I was so foolish as to write the AVP of Instruction saying randomly, casually, something like “Hey, okay, so I can’t move strong students out. But so long as I’m teaching an intervention class for really really weak students, could I move some of my weak non-intervention class IN? Some of them are even Resource (sped) students, so they could substitute the intervention class for their guided studies class, so it wouldn’t create a scheduling disaster (sped kids get a study hall). Here’s a list.”

AVP of Instruction wrote back, in all caps, “THESE STUDENTS ARE SOPHOMORES. SOPHOMORES CAN’T TAKE INTERVENTION.”

Three weeks later, as God is my witness, the AVP of Instruction sends me a note, “I’m moving Fred McInery [not his real name] into your intervention class. He is a weak math student who needs more support.”

I look up Fred. He is a sophomore. I am very excited, because I am a moron, and send her a note. “Hey, great! We’re putting sophomores in intervention now? Could we revisit my list? I really think it will help these extremely weak students succeed in math.”

She writes back in all caps, “THESE STUDENTS ARE SOPHOMORES. SOPHOMORES CAN’T TAKE INTERVENTION.”

WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA.

That story is an amusing flashback, even if it is crazy-making. Here is a horrible one:

We shall call her Denise. She is a doll. She was in my intervention class and had extremely weak skills and was the propaganda child for intervention, the one that everyone is thinking of when they propose it, because she worked her ass off and actually became better at math. She was not “just below the cutoff point”, either, but an FBB child who surreptitiously counted on her fingers to add 4 + 2. But conceptually, she got it. In the first semester, she did so poorly she was one of my contract students. She improved dramatically on her test, missing Basic by just a point. She had the third highest state test score of my intervention students, and passed my class.

Not only didn’t the school move her on to Geometry, but they put her into intervention again. (Yes. Now they had a sophomore intervention class.) When Denise told me this, I went quietly berserk and emailed the AVP of Instruction. It is not the same AVP. This one is worse.

Keep in mind, this second year at the same school, I am teaching Geometry, thank all the gods, and have two of my last year’s intervention kids taking my class even though they received slightly lower state test scores than Denise. Five others of my kids have also moved on to geometry with lower state test scores. Denise and three others were kept behind. I email the AVP of Instruction—a different one, as last year’s AVP has been promoted to principal of another school. This AVP is much worse–and point out these facts. I do not point out that I can discern no organizing principle behind this decision, that I suspect a very disorganized AV principal behind it. I am very polite; hey, this is just some oversight? Want to make sure it gets cleared up.

I write three notes, all very polite, and finally, a month after school starts, Denise gets moved….to a regular Algebra class. I gnash my teeth, but Denise is thrilled and thanks me profusely.

I see Denise at the year-end, and ask how she’s doing. “Great. But I failed the first semester of geometry, so I’ll have to go to summer school.”

“What? They put you in geometry?”

“Yeah, they said you advised it. But they didn’t move me until, like, November, so I failed. But that’s okay. I did good second semester, and I’m going to pass it over the summer.”

I guess it worked out okay, ultimately. But had she been put in the geometry class originally, she’d have had her summer.

Double-dosing had an immediate impact on student performance in algebra, increasing the proportion of students earning at least a B by 9.4 percentage points, or more than 65 percent. It did not have a significant impact on passing rates in 9th-grade algebra, however, or in geometry (usually taken the next year). Double-dosed students were, however, substantially more likely to pass trigonometry, a course typically taken in 11th grade. The mean GPA across all math courses taken after freshman year increased by 0.14 grade points on a 4.0 scale.

(emphasis mine)

Clearly, most students did not do all that well. As the study acknowledges, the low-achieving students did not benefit at all from the intervention; the students most likely to benefit were those who just missed the cutoff. More on that later.

Here’s what the study doesn’t make clear: many high school algebra students never make it to trig. They take it twice in high school, then take geometry twice. Or they take algebra once, geometry twice, and algebra 2 without trig (that’s the class I teach). So are they only counting the students who made it to trig?

The more meaningful stat would be the percentage of double-dosed kids who made it to trig vs. the non-double-dosed kids who achieved same. Reading this passage, the study appears to be saying that all the kids made it to trig and hahahahahaha, no. Not happening.

And since that’s not happening, then who, exactly, is being compared in the GPA? All the kids, or just the ones that made it to trigonometry? Presumably, just that set, because otherwise, the GPA number isn’t worth much. Hey, the double dose kids who flunked algebra twice and made through geometry by their senior year had a GPA .14 points higher than the single dose kids who made it through trig. Whoo and hoo.

It is important to note that many of these results are much stronger for students with weaker reading skills, as measured by their 8th-grade reading scores. For example, double-dosing raised the ACT scores of students with below-average reading scores by 0.22 standard deviations but raised above-average readers’ ACT scores by only 0.09 standard deviations. The overall impact of double-dosing on college enrollment is almost entirely due to its 13-percentage-point impact on below-average readers (see Figure 3). This unexpected pattern may reflect the intervention’s focus on reading and writing skills in the context of learning algebra.

(emphasis mine)

Oh, yes. That’s what we do in these algebra intervention classes. We focus on reading and writing! We’re given a bunch of kids who add 8 to 6 on their fingers, and we figure their struggle comes from not being able to read the word problems. So we put up a word wall and teach them five new terms and suddenly their reading skills skyrocket wildly.

Or—and this is just a wild, random, thought—perhaps my last school isn’t the only school in which Set A = {names of students taking double dose algebra} and Set B = {names of students taking double dose English} and is a Venn diagram in the two circles largely overlap?

You say oh, don’t be silly, ER. Of course they’d account for the possibility that the double dose algebra kids are also getting a double dose of reading intervention! And then not mention it! And I say, you don’t read much educational research, do you?

Because keep in mind the conclusion of this research:

As a whole, these results imply that the double-dose policy greatly improved freshman algebra grades for the higher-achieving double-dosed students, but had relatively little impact on passing rates for the lower-achieving students.

Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how’d you like the friggin’ play?

Look. None of my outraged noise makes any sense at all if you don’t realize that, in the world of high school math, the kids who benefited, according to this study, kids achieving just below the passing standard, are WAY ABOVE AVERAGE for that population, particularly in a Title I school. Intervention exists because these schools have dozens, if not hundreds, of algebra students who have taken the course three times and still score Far Below Basic. It does not exist to help kids just below the 50% mark in math get better scores in reading, marginally higher grades and ACT scores, and better Trig scores—if they get to trig, which the normal intervention kid does not.

What people fondly imagine algebra intervention to do is this: kids are just a little behind, you know? They just need some extra time learning integer operations and fractions. They didn’t learn it the FIRST FIFTEEN TIMES they were taught it, so all they really need is another hour or so a day and they’ll be right up there with the rest of them, all right? And if they aren’t, well, it’s those damn teachers who just don’t want to work with “those kids”, and we’ll just have to find more teachers who really, really care about these kids who just need a few hours more help than the others. (Yes. This is the myth of “They’ve never been taught…..”)

Meanwhile, forty percent of the freshman class comes in having taken algebra once and scored far below basic or barely below basic, and are randomly assigned to double block or no double block using a dartboard, from what I can see. The teachers are dealing with the same lack of basic skills in both double and single block algebra, and rapidly realize (if they didn’t know already) that the kids who don’t know integer operations and fractions have this gap because they aren’t terribly bright. They can’t come up with an intervention vs. non-intervention approach, because some kids in the intervention class don’t need support while some kids in the non-intervention class do. But in the non-intervention classes, the teachers only have to deal with 3-8 kids with low skills, while in the intervention classes it’s 14-15 out of 20. So the only thing different about the intervention classes is monstrously bad behavior and more time in hell.

All this, mind you, so that we can do research that reveals no real improvement in outcomes.

But I’m out of it, baby. It’s enough to make me believe in god. Death to algebra intervention.

But the nightmares, they won’t stop until it’s destroyed!

100 Posts

I started this blog on January 1 with two primary goals. As I mentioned in my initial post, I’d gone a whole year without writing anything for publication (under my real name, which is not Ed). I wanted to initiate more and respond less, and I wanted my writing here to spur me to write more under my real name. As a second goal, I hoped to reflect the full spectrum of my views on education and teaching—and nothing more. I wanted to write both about teaching and educational policy. I teach a great many subjects, and the joys of teaching composition, literature, American history, and text prep ideally needed some of my writing attention, while I expected to write primarily about the challenges of teaching math (yes, I am saying there are relatively few joys in teaching math, but that doesn’t mean I’d give it up.) When the subject turned to educational policy, I expected to focus on the degree to which Voldemortean avoidance prevents us from sane, realistic objectives, but I also intended to discuss the very real problems I saw with both eduform and progressive math philosophies.

Thus far, the blog has exceeded my goals. I had one very successful piece go out under my own name, and to the extent I haven’t written more it’s been because of time constraints. I have plenty of ideas, which was not the case a year ago, when I felt hamstrung. I also think my posts fairly reflect all my teaching interests.

What I didn’t expect, and has been deeply satisfying, is the degree of attention many of my posts have had. Here are the top six posts:

1. Algebra, and the Pointlessness of the Whole Damn Thing

2. The myth of “They weren’t ever taught…”
3. Teacher Quality Pseudofacts, Part II
4. Why Chris Hayes Fails
5. The Gap in the GRE
6. Homework and Grades

I wrote all but one of these hoping they’d get a big audience—Homework and Grades is the exception; while it got a nice bump when it first came out with a link from Joanne Jacobs, most of the activity has been from consistent attention over time. People refer to it a great deal, for some reason. (Actually, half of my big pieces got link love from JJ, and a host of smaller ones as well, which means a lot because she’s the best pure education blogger out there. Other bloggers who contributed a lot of readers to the above pieces: Steve Sailer and Gene Expression.)

Three policy pieces that I was personally pleased with, audience or not: Why Chris Christie Picks on Teachers, On the CTU Strike, and The Fallacy at the Heart of All Reform.

Three teaching pieces that are regularly linked to or used as references by teachers: Modeling Linear Equations, Teaching Algebra, or Banging Your Head with a Whiteboard, and Teaching Polynomials.

Total views at the time of this post: 38,000

I’d also like to shout out to my commenters and Twitter readers. Thanks for your great feedback.

So on to the next 100. I’d say I’ll try to keep them brief, but that’s a big lie.

Administrators

I like my current principal more than any of my previous overlords—and I pretty much liked all of them as well. Of course, I never forget they are management, and like all long-term corporate survivors I consider management all-powerful, functionally (not personally) untrustworthy, and utterly irrelevant to my own job performance. They aren’t evil. It’s just baked into the job description. So this opening story isn’t a complaint, just an opening.

We were in a two hour staff meeting today and the principal wandered by. It struck me that until that moment I hadn’t even seen him for three weeks—I mean, literally seen him. I haven’t actually had a conversation with him since the first day of school. In that same period I’ve spoken to the AVP who interviewed me twice for a minute each time, just hi, how are you. I don’t even know the other two AVP’s names; they haven’t stopped by or introduced themselves. No administrator has even entered my room, much less watched me teach.

And this utter isolation from administrators is the norm, for me. I spent two years at my last job; the principal spent a grand total of 40 minutes in my classroom. 20 for evaluation, 20 with a district visitor, all 40 minutes during in the first year, although she didn’t actually give me the results of my eval until a 5-minute meeting the last day of school. She never set foot in my classroom the second year when students were present. Two AVPs spent, collectively, an hour in my room over the first year (about 30 minutes each, spread out over the year), and the AVP who did my eval the second year never spent a moment in my classroom and few even talking to me until the first observation.

My first year as a teacher, I taught at a ultra-progressive school; the principal gave me two hour long evals and a nice follow-up meeting for each. Except for those two evals, however, the administrators were never in my room and I did little more than nod hi to them periodically—it was a smaller school than the other two, so we ran into each other more frequently.

Is it like that for all new teachers? No. If a teacher’s classroom is out of control, the administrators will live there. If the teacher has highly sought after attributes (i.e., young and male) the administrators will do everything short of buying him hookers to win him over, and part of that winning over involves visiting his classroom, giving him lots of praise, extra earning opportunities, and seeking his input on everything short of buying new whiteboard erasers. No, I am not bitter, truly. That’s just how it rolls.

But if a newly hired teacher isn’t spectacularly bad or a hot commodity, he or she is ignored. This gives the administrator complete flexibility without the embarrassment of having to walk back any untoward comments, like praise or condemnation. The first evaluation can be noncommittal, leaving plenty of room to give a second bad one if the district needs to give a few extra teachers the boot, or if a new hot commodity has graduated and someone needs to be cut. (While I am not certain, tenured teachers seem to see administrators more often; maybe they have less to worry about and actively seek them out.)

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not the hot commodity type, even though I’m a damn good teacher for just three years in. I’m not mad about this, more mildly chagrined and amused. I charge enough money per hour in my private tutoring sessions that my ego’s not at stake, and I’ve long since realized that teacher assessment is largely ideological.

So when eduformers talk about the importance of allowing administrators complete control over the hiring and firing of teachers, I’m like um, what? Are you insane? Principals are managers. They went into management because they find it appealing. That’s fine. It does not make them expert judges of teaching ability. In fact, it probably means they were entirely adequate but not stupendous teachers, because no matter how much you need the money, you don’t leave teaching if you’re stupendous. It’s a drug. And principals simply aren’t spending much time in classrooms; if they do, the other aspects of their job will suffer. PR outranks HR every time. How complicated is that?

Principals have considerable hiring autonomy; unless the district reallocates personnel, they interview and pick their own candidates. In my state they get fifteen months in which they can boot a teacher on a whim. A teacher can get sterling evaluations, be declared teacher of the year, and fired unceremoniously any time in the first two years—in some districts, it can take even longer to get tenure.

That strikes me as adequate time to give principals complete control over staff. After that, giving principals any control at all is spooky, in my view, but I guess most of the time limited firing ability works out because firing long-time teachers on a whim gets the rest of the staff pissed off. But giving them unlimited termination powers? Seriously? Why would we give government employees the autonomy of a small business owner?

If eduformers are absurd in their expectation for principals, progressives—and teachers themselves—aren’t any more realistic in their expectations. When I hear them going on and on about the importance of good leadership, I just yawn. A principal is—must be—focused on selling an image: to teachers, to parents, to the district, to the community. The extent to which he or she keeps the trains running on time is entirely dependent on which trains are carrying the most important passengers at that point in time. That’s their job.

Needless to say, I’ve stopped taking the evaluation process itself seriously. I’m interested in good feedback and suggestions—no, really! But the evaluation isn’t even remotely about me. The principal is interested in contract compliance (all teachers on the evaluation list undergo observation by October 20th. Check.) This evaluation process has nothing at all to do with whether or not the principal decides to keep me, either. It’s just cover.

And I’m fine with that. I just wish I didn’t have to go through the pretense every year that, in this observation, the administrator could suddenly discover that a teacher who has been utterly ignored for two to three months is in fact a wholly unsatisfactory teacher, one who is utterly failing to meet objectives. Really? Three months of nothing, followed by 30-40 minutes of observation, and suddenly the teacher is unsatisfactory? What sort of manager are you Sir or Madame Administrator, that you hadn’t figured that out before?

But in fact, a bad early eval that comes out of the blue is just a sign that the principal has someone else lined up for your job next year. I’d rather they do away with the extra effort, and the principal just had a form that said “Like/Don’t Like (circle one)”. But oh, well. Sorry, Sonny. Make sure the mortician fixes you up nice.

This is a good time to reiterate that at this point in time, given our current determination to delude ourselves about student ability, the existing teacher evaluation and tenure system is the best possible option. Mess with it at your peril. I’m personally certain the adjustments eduformers fantasize about will hurt low ability, low income kids. But that’s a different post.

On the CTU Strike

Okay, unless I missed something, Rahm is CTU’s bitch.

Chicago, which is mostly broke, is hiring more teachers in languages, music and special ed, paying them more salary, paying them for supplies (still very little), paying them for suspensions, agreeing to limit their class sizes, paying their health premiums same as always, maybe even paying them for paternity leave. In return, they got….very little. They can hire new teachers over laid off teachers. They can use test scores for teacher evaluations—up to 30%.

I was enthralled by the CTU strike. Totally fascinated that an extremely overweight, frowsy, no-bullshit, way the hell left of center black woman virtually coldcocked a younger, relatively good-looking hard ass Democrat mayor who’s best buds with the big O.

I’m also pleased with the results, because the media was entirely on Rahm’s side. Harold Myerson and, much later, Eugene Robinson were the only major columnists who came out for the teachers. The Nation supported unions, for the most part. Everyone else slammed the unions hard. There were the cautious skeptics, like Kevin Drum, but almost no one criticized Rahm for being anything but too soft, while there were plenty of CTU beatdowns like this Charles Lane rant, which was truly depressing, since I normally like Lane.

Any story that up and bitchslaps the opinion leaders is a joy to behold. The elites are largely of one mind on education reform, even those who aren’t actually in the reform business; whether neo-liberal or conservative, it’s up with accountability and choice, down with unions who protect “bad teachers”. They really don’t seem capable of grasping that after 10-15 years of non-stop rhetoric on the supposed failure of public schools, they’ve barely moved the needle on public opinion, which isn’t sure whether the rhetoric is true and just not relevant, or a flat-out lie, or some of both. So when the polls showed the Chicago residents supporting the unions (Hispanics and blacks supporting by a substantial majority; whites were at 48%, which is much higher than I would have anticipated given how few white kids attend CPS), it was a hoot to watch everyone struggle to accomodate reality. Hard to call parents stupid when your big current issue is parental triggers, but really, what options are there?

The education reform movement and its growing body of elite adherents live in an echo chamber. Their political success, like NCLB and teacher evaluations via test scores, has been gained by a combination of federal fiat and public indifference for a cause that doesn’t affect most voters and sure sounds noble. Their own surveys reveal that public support for reform causes is soft, but they all keep talking as if they’re riding a wave of political outrage with just those nasty unions—not the teachers, just the unions—opposing the will of the people.

A Gallup poll reveals once again that more people think NCLB made public education worse than made it better, and a large majority thinks it made no difference or made things worse. And that’s when they are asked about education at the national level; everyone knows what Americans think of their local schools. Like Obamacare, education reform isn’t gaining fans with time.

But if I’m right about public indifference/rejection, why are charter schools growing like weeds?

I offer this up as opinion/assertion, without a lot of evidence to back me: most parents know intuitively that bad teachers aren’t a huge problem. What they care about, from top to bottom of the income scale, is environment. Suburban white parents don’t want poor black and Hispanic kids around. Poor black and Hispanic parents don’t want bad kids around. (Yes, this means suburban parents see poor kids as mostly bad kids.) Asian parents don’t want white kids around, much less black or Hispanic. White parents don’t really want too many Asians around, either, but that’s the opposite of the “bad kids” problem.

Parents don’t care much about teacher quality. They care a lot about peer group quality.

They are right to worry. Before I became a teacher, I’d read other teachers talk about how just a few kids can really disrupt a classroom, moving management from a no-brainer to the primary focus of the day. Now I am one of those teachers. I’ve worked in several schools in which the overwhelming presence of low income students who didn’t care about their grades has utterly removed the “stigma of an F” from the entire population, causing panic in the upper middle income white parents who can’t quite afford private school yet live in a district that worries about lawsuits if they track by ability. Their kids, particularly the boy kids, start to adopt this opinion, and white failure rates start rising.

So charters become a way for parents to sculpt their school environments. White parents stuck in majority/minority districts start progressive charters that brag about their minority population but are really a way to keep the brown kids limited to the well-behaved ones. Low income black and Hispanic parents want safe schools. Many of them apply for charter school lotteries because they know charters can kick out the “bad kids” without fear of lawsuits. But they still blame the “bad kids”, not the teachers, which is why they might send their kids to charter schools while still ejecting Adrian Fenty for Michelle Rhee’s sins.

As I’ve mentioned before, education reformers are now pushing suburban charters with strong academic focus, which are nothing more than tracking for parents who can’t get their public schools to do it for them.

I really can’t stress this point enough: charters have succeeded because of their ability to control students, not teachers. Comprehensive schools are bound by legal requirements and the constant threat of disparate impact lawsuits. It’s really that simple.

Charter schools don’t scale. What we should be doing, ideally, is “flipping” the populations. Charter schools can focus on one of three populations: low incentives, special ed, or non-native English speakers. Let the large comprehensives focus on the general population.

If comprehensive schools didn’t fear disparate impact lawsuits for expelling problem students and tracking; if free and appropriate education was dramatically limited in scope; if non-native English speakers were expected to learn English on their own, parents in “diverse” districts would become a whole lot less worried about their local schools and the charter movement would take a huge hit.

Wait, where was I? The CTU strike. But it’s related. The strike succeeded in large part because the reform Democrats were shocked to discover that the city population sided with the teachers. While I’m pleased at the outcome for the reasons outlined, costs are still a huge problem, particularly pensions. So what’s the answer?

Rick Hess compares the Chicago strike, brought about by Democrats, to the Wisconsin reforms (assuming they survive the courts). Democrats argue that reform can be achieved by working with unions; Governor Scott Walker just went after pension costs and won (again, so far).

I’m not sure I buy that distinction (although any article that calls Steven Brill a loser gets my vote). Rahm’s not a governor; he could only deal at the district level, and his ex-boss needs unions for his re-election bid. While he seemed to fold on everything, it may be that he had no options once the teachers walked out—again, because to reformers’ consternation, the parents and the public sided with the teachers. Walker had a legislature backing his play.

But I also wonder how much of the difference is due to the fact that Walker focused entirely on cost-cutting, without getting into accountability or merit. It’s one thing for the public to support teachers fighting for air-conditioning and against unfair evaluations, quite another to support their right to free guaranteed pensions on the taxpayers’ dime.

So here is my advice for Republicans:

1. Focus on government worker pension pcosts. All government workers. No giving cops and firefighters a free ride. (The public supports this, too.)
2. To the extent possible, scale back existing retirees’ benefits and pay, as opposed to focusing only on new and current workers.
3. Instead of blaming teachers and unions, blame the frigging courts. They’re the huge obstacle to pension and union reform. Ask Arnold. Ask Scott Walker.
4. Stop pushing charter schools and accountability. Start talking about the need to bring back tracking, and giving schools control over their environments. Talk about scaling back special education. Accept the Hispanic vote as a lost cause and start asking pointed questions about the cost of educating kids who can’t speak English.

As Rick Hess has noted elsewhere, parents see accountability as a problem for poor people, one they support rather like one supports Brussel sprouts—they taste like crap, but they’re supposed to be healthy. Neither political party is speaking to the hopes and fears of most parents.

So the CTU strike and its outcome, ideally, should resonate as a lasting symbol of the failure of education reform to win public opinion. This could be an opportunity for anyone willing to withstand disapproval by the elite machine that dictates acceptable opinions. That should be the job of Republicans in this environment. I’m afraid they’re not up to the task.

The Sinister Assumption Fueling KIPP Skeptics?

Stuart Buck on KIPP critics:

It’s unwitting, to be sure; most of the critics haven’t thought through the logical implications of what they’re saying, and they would sincerely deny being racist in their thoughts or intentions. But even granting their personal good will, what they are saying is full of racially problematic implications. These KIPP critics are effectively saying that poor minority children are incapable of genuinely learning anything more than they already do. If poor minority children seem to be learning more, it can’t really be true; there must be some more sinister explanation for what’s going on.
…..
Now here’s the key point: If selection and attrition is what explains KIPP’s good results, then that logically means that several hundred extra hours a year being instructed in reading, math, music, art, etc. do NOT explain KIPP’s good results. But wait a minute: what does that really mean?
….
Nothing less than this: several hundred hours a years instructing kids doesn’t actually make much difference. Recall that KIPP’s critics say that if KIPP’s students seem to be learning more, it must be an artifact of how KIPP selects kids and then pushes out the low-performers. In saying that, KIPP’s critics are implying, however unwittingly, that no amount of effort or study could possibly get poor urban minorities to learn anything more.

Okay, let me be clear that I am not speaking for any other KIPP critic. While I don’t talk much about KIPP, I am certainly one who thinks their results are due to attrition, creaming, and the benefits that accrue from a homogenous and motivated population.

But yeah. In a nutshell, I’m saying this:

IF you take low ability kids (of any race or income) and IF you select for motivation in the parents, at least, and IF you remove the misbehaving or otherwise highly dysfunctional kids who don’t share their parents’ motivation, and IF you enforce strict behavioral indoctrination in middle class mores and IF you give them hundreds of hours more education a year and IF they are in middle school and IF they are simply being asked to catch up with the material that middle to high ability kids learned fairly effortlessly—that is, elementary reading and math skills…..

…then they will have a slightly better test scores than similarly motivated low ability kids stuck in classes with the misbehavers and highly dysfunctional kids and fewer hours of seat time and less behavioral indoctrination into middle class mores, but their underlying abilities will still be weak and just as far behind their higher ability peers as they were before KIPP.

I’ve written before, improving elementary school or middle school scores is a false god when it comes to improving actual high school outcomes. Children who need tons of hours to get up to grade level fundamentally differ from those reading at or above grade level from kindergarten on, and this difference matters increasingly as school gets harder. High school isn’t the linear steps through increased difficulty that occurs in grades K-8, but a much different and far more difficult animal, now that we make everyone take college prep classes. There’s no evidence that KIPP students are learning more or closing the gap in high school, and call me cynical but I’m really, really sure we’d be hearing about it if they were. KIPP is not transforming low ability kids into high ability kids, or even mid-level ability kids.

I am comfortable asserting that hours and hours of additional education time does nothing to change underlying ability. I’m not a racist, nor am I a nihilist who believes outcomes are set from birth. I do, however, hold the view that academic outcomes are determined in large part by cognitive ability. The reason scores are low in high poverty, high minority schools is primarily due to the fact that the students’ abilities are low to begin with, not because they enter school with a fixable deficit that just needs time to fill, and not because they fall behind thanks to poor teachers or misbehaving peers.

That doesn’t mean we can’t improve outcomes, particularly in high school, when we do a great deal of harm by trying to teach kids what they can’t learn and refusing to teach them what they can learn. And it doesn’t mean we couldn’t tremendously improve elementary school outcomes in numbers, if not individual demonstrated ability, by allowing public schools to do what KIPP does—namely, limit classes to motivated kids of similar ability.

Paul Bruno, another KIPP skeptic (whose views in no way should be confused with mine), thinks it’s wrong to dismiss KIPP achievements, because they show that public schools for low income kids simply need much more money. I disagree. What KIPP “success” shows is the importance of well-behaved, homogeneous classes.

So here’s my preferred takeaway from KIPP and other successful charter schools:

Since it’s evident that much of these schools’ success stories come from their ability to control and limit the population, why are we still hamstringing public schools? Here’s a thought: how about KIPP schools take those really, really tough kids and only those kids? Misbehave too often in public schools and off you go to a KIPP bootcamp, where they will drill you with slogans and do their best to indoctrinate you into middle class behavior and after a while you’ll behave because please, god, anything to get back to the nicer public schools! You could also create KIPP schools for special ed kids–put the special ed kids with cognitive issues and learning disabilities in their own, smaller schools. Meanwhile, public schools could extend the school day a bit, help the kids catch up as much as possible while still making school fun. While the average test score might not improve much, this approach would keep a lot of kids engaged in school through elementary school instead of lost, bored, or acting out in chaotic classes disrupted by a few unmanageable or extremely low ability kids.

See, that would scale a lot better. Instead, we set up small schools for what is actually the majority of all low income students—reasonably well-behaved, of low to middle ability and, with no one around to lead them astray, willing to give school a shot. Only a few kids get into these schools, while the rest of them are stuck in schools where just a few misbehavers make class impossible and really low ability kids take up a lot of addtional teacher time. Crazy, that’s what it is. But what I just laid out is completely unworkable from an ideological standpoint, and as I just explained in an earlier post, school policy is set by ideology and politics, not educational validity. To say nothing of the fact that KIPP doesn’t want to teach “those” kids.

Anyway. The reality is that yes, a low ability kid, regardless of income or race, will not, on average, become a high or mid ability kid simply because he spends a lot of seat time working his butt off in a KIPP school. Sorry Stuart.

The Fallacy at the Heart of All Reform

A while back*, Rick Hess told education leaders to get over their “allergy” to policy. It took me a while to figure out what he was talking about, since education leaders are, for the most part, all about policy. (Teachers are another matter; they could give three nickels for policy.)

But a closer reading reveals that Hess is chastising education leaders—who do, despite his post, involve themselves in educational policy—for not agreeing with politicians on their current policy mandates. Hess says the politicians are the heart of reason:

Let me put it this way. If you were an elected official and were responsible for elementary schools where only half of kids are reading at grade level and high schools where only fifty percent of students are graduating, it’d be pretty understandable (and laudable, even) to think you can’t simply trust the educators to do the right thing.

Gosh. Those poor elected officials, trudging along, minding their own business, forced—yea, I say forced!–into the educational arena by the sheer incompetence of schools that can’t get their kids to read at grade level. Let us all bleed for them.

But while we are slitting our veins for a few ounces, some questions: what is this “grade level” he speaks of? And what are the academic expectations of a high school graduate? In fact, when did we declare that everyone should graduate high school, and why? When did we establish guidelines of what appropriate standards are? And aren’t those….you know, it kills me to bring it up, but aren’t those state responsibilities?

Yes, yes, I can hear the reply now. Of course it’s a state responsibility, constitution, blah blah blah. In fact the high school movement, the uniquely American push to increase access to a high school education, was a local movement. But the states want federal money, so naturally the federal government has an oversight role.

But when did the feds start giving the states money for education? Well, that would be when the states started incurring costs imposed upon public schools either by federal law or federal court fiat.

First up, of course, was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act’s Title I, designed to improve educational outcomes for the poor. More money would help the poor and close the achievement gap, so the thinking went–and still goes, although the Coleman Report, issued a year later, established that school spending had far less to do with student outcomes than student SES and background. But the expectation was set into law—all outcomes should be equal. No research, no science, no school has ever proven this out. It was just the sort of blithe expectation we had during the civil rights era that certainly seemed to be true. Unfortunately, when that expectation didn’t prove out, no one seemed to recall that we had no proof that it could ever be true. They just looked for someone else to blame. So the federal dollars came with more and more expectations, demanding an outcome that hadn’t ever been established as realistic to start with.

But Title I was just the start. In 1974, the Supreme Court, in Lau vs. Nichols, required the schools to educate kids in their native languages (ironically, this demand originated from the Asian community; bet they’re happy about that one now!). Then the Court told the schools that they have to educate illegal immigrants in Plyler vs. Doe, denying that there might be a “compelling state interest” in educating only those here legally. Don’t forget busing, disparate impact, free and appropriate education, inclusion….they cover all these court cases in ed school, did you know?

Meanwhile, Congress is busy declaring that children with mental and physical disabilities are guaranteed a free and appropriate public education, regardless of the cost, with a guaranteed Individualized Education Plan following when IDEA is passed in 1990.

So the feds are placing increasing burdens on the local school systems, often in the form of unfunded mandates, other times adding dollars with strings of steel.

These reforms were almost exclusively driven by progressives—liberals who believe that educational inequality is caused by unequal spending, white privilege, racism, prejudice, discrimination….you know that drill, too. Progressives were intent on improving access. While it’s likely that they, too, thought that access would end the achievement gap, they adjusted quickly when that expectation didn’t prove out. By the 80s, progressives in educational policy almost entirely anti-testing. They pooh-poohed SAT scores as racist and culturally biased. They instituted the multi-culti curricum, softened analytical requirements as much as possible whilst giving lip service to that all important “critical thinking”, declared tracking or other forms of ability grouping by demonstrated ability as another means of whites maintaining their institutional privilege, and declared that academic achievement could be demonstrated in many ways. To the extent possible, they ignored or downplayed demonstrated achievement in favor of a student’s effort, community service, and dedication to social justice.

So the original federal mandates were all initiated by progressives.

In contrast, the people we now call “reformers” (that I often refer to as “eduformers”) were largely conservatives. Checker Finn, Mike Petrilli, the Thernstroms, and Diane Ravitch before her switch—all policy wonks in Republican administrations or organizations (except Rotherham worked in a Democrat administration.)

The original reform movement originated as anti-progressive reform. Bill Bennett, in many ways the ur-Reformer, began his stint in the public eye by opposing or castigating many of the progressive mandates. He did his best to end native language instruction when he was Ed Sec, was pro-tracking, against affirmative action, and often castigated teacher unions as instruments of political indoctrination. Back in the 80s and 90s, Checker Finn lambasted the anti-tracking push and derided racial or economic integration as an end to itself, arguing that the important outcome was safe schools with effective teachers, not an obsession with numerical balance. Rare were the reformers who weren’t adamantly in favor of tracking, skeptical of mainstreaming special education kids, and opposed to bilingual education in native language. Educating illegal immigrants is possibly the only area in which reformers might have originally agreed with progressives (and consequently stand in stark disagreement with many parents).

They’ve softened this approach in recent years. For example, Mike Petrilli now writes about differentiation, and can be seen here telling a clearly skeptical, but not oppositional, Checker Finn about the way that differentiation avoids the bad old days of racially segregated approach of tracking. While many reformers used to openly oppose affirmative action, now they’re just really quiet about it, or promote charters for suburban families or selective public schools, both of which are just tracking in a different form (or reform, hyuk). No reformer has ever dared take on the special education mandates and the parental torrents of rage that would turn in his direction were he to be so foolish; instead, they’ll just talk up the charters that get to skate those mandates.

So, for the first twenty to thirty years, progressives dramatically reformed public education through federal interventions. Conservatives opposed many of the initiatives. Progressives denounced opposition as racist and elitist. Conservatives tried to hold progressives responsible for these initiatives through accountability, and declared that parents needed more choice in schools, to get away from the forced control imposed by the progressive viewpoint. Progressives continued to denounce opposition as racist and elitist.

Finally, in the late 90s, conservatives figured out an effective strategy to gain support for their reforms. They took a card from the progressive deck, and demanded that the schools live up to the educational objectives the progressives had set for them. It wasn’t enough just to desegregate classes by race, income, language and learning status. The schools needed to demonstrate that they were teaching everyone equally, that there were “no excuses” for failure. Excuses were—wait for it—racist and elitist. Accountability became the club through which they could achieve choice, and choice would weaken public schools, thus weakening progressives and—not to put too fine a point on it—unions, whose political power the reformers saw as the primary opponent of their political objectives. By demanding equal performance and softening or eliminating their opposition to tracking, bi-lingual education, and all the other progressive hot spots, they could beat the progressives on their head with their own club.

They’d finally figured out the unassailable rhetorical approach. Who could oppose setting mandates requiring everyone—of all races, incomes, and abilities—achieve proficiency? Only racists and elitists. Who could oppose punishing such failure with consequences? Only racists and elitists. Who could oppose giving parents and their students a way to escape from these horrible schools that fail to educate their students to proficiency? Yes, progressives with their excuses of poverty and culture and isolation—they’re the racists. The same people who gave lip service to equality are now fighting the reformers’ efforts to achieve the reality—so not only are progressives elitist and racist, they’re hypocrites, too!

And so, the current reform movement set new federal mandates, which takes those original mandates of the 70s and 80s and shoves them down schools’ throats, hoisting any progressive opposition on its own petard. Unions who opposed accountability on behalf of the teachers, who know full well that equal outcomes are utterly impossible, could now be castigated as anti-education, fat, entitled organizations who protected all the terrible teachers preventing the nation from reaching the dream that progressives started, the dream that progressives have now abandoned, that reformers are finally helping the nation reach. Over time, this approach picked up some new democrats, who aren’t overly fond of unions and tend to sneer at the reputedly low educational achievement of teachers, and the billionaires who Diane Ravitch, now on the other side, excoriates regularly for finding a new hobby.

I’m no fan of progressives, so it’s pretty amusing watching them sputter. They can’t say, “WTF? We never thought everyone would actually achieve at the same level, dammit! We wanted everything to look equal, so that we could browbeat employers and colleges! Tests are racist!” Besides, it’s their idiotic mandates we’re all being forced to live up to now, and they had no more basis for demanding them than reformers do in enforcing them.

So here we are. Schools are stuck with the outcome of two different waves of political reform—first, the progressive mandates designed to enforce surface “equality” of their dreams, then the reforms mandated by conservatives to make the surface equality a reality, which they knew was impossible but would give them a tool to break progressives and, more importantly, unions.

From the schools’ point of view, all these mandates, progressive or “reform” are alike in one key sense: they are bent on imposing political and ideological mandates that haven’t the slightest link to educational validity.

No one has ever made an effective case that non-native speakers can be educated as well as native speakers, regardless of the method used. No one has ever established that integration, racial or economic, improves educational outcomes. No one has ever demonstrated that blacks or Hispanics can achieve at the same average level as whites (or that whites can achieve at the same level as Asians, although no one gets worked up about that gap), nor has anyone ever demonstrated that poor students can achieve equally with their higher-income peers. No one has ever established that kids with IQs below 90 can achieve at the same level as kids with IQs above 100, or examined the difference in outcomes of educating kids with high vs. low motivation. And the only thing that has changed in forty years is that anyone who points this out will now be labelled elitist and racist by both sides of the educational debate, instead of just one.

So back to Hess. Hess’s rationale for political interference starts with the premise that low test scores means failing schools. When Hess says that a politician whose district schools show half or more kids reading below grade level can’t trust educators to do the right thing, he is assuming that half or more kids reading below grade level is a bad result.

Hess is using exactly the same rationale that progressives did when they labelled schools racist/elitist/pick your ist for enrolling fewer blacks, Hispanics, poor kids or dyslexics in advanced classes. It’s the fallacy at the heart of all reform: that all kids can achieve equally.

We don’t know that this is true. In order to call test scores “low”, we assume that all populations can achieve to the same average ability. We don’t know that they can. All available evidence says that they can not, that race, special education status, and poverty are not excuses but genuine, reliable predictors of lower achievement.

But thanks to the combined efforts of progressives and eduformers and their blithe lack of interest in the validity of their expectations, schools are now stuck with mandates that force them to pretend that all students can achieve equally to the same average ability, even though no research supports this. When Virginia bit the bullet to acknowledge that race is in some way related to achievement (note: I don’t think race is a direct factor, just an unsettling proxy), they were browbeaten and hammered into backing down, although I was cheered to see they still used race for achievement goals.

Rick Hess is wrong in saying that education leaders are “allergic” to policy. They are “allergic” to mandates with no relationship to reality. And his sympathy for political leaders who are dragged in reluctantly, poor folks, to spare the kids from uncaring, dysfunctional schools is also misplaced. The problem isn’t the schools. The problem is the mandates—both progressive and reform. The problem is the imposition of political and ideological objectives into the educational world, screaming and howling and suing for five impossible things before breakfast.

*Yeah, I started writing this a month ago and got distracted.

Algebra and the Pointlessness of The Whole Damn Thing

The whole algebra debate kicked off by Hacker’s algebra essay has…..well, if not depressed me, then at least enervated me.

A recap:

Hacker:

We shouldn’t make everyone take algebra. No one needs algebra anyway; we never really use it. Statistics would be much more useful. Algebra is the primary obstacle to high school success; millions of kids are failing because they can’t manage this course. If we just allowed students to have an easier time in high school, more of them would graduate successfully and go on to college.

Outraged Opposition:

Algebra is essential to college success and “real life” and one of many obstacles to high school success. No one is happy with the current state of affairs, but it’s clear that kids aren’t learning algebra because their teachers suck, particularly in elementary school. We need to teach math better in the lower grades, rather than lower our standards. Besides, the corollary to “not everyone should take algebra” is “some people should take algebra” and just how are you planning to divide up those teams? (Examples: Dan Willingham, Dropout Nation)

Judicious Analysis:

Sigh. Guys, this is really a debate about tracking, you know? And no one wants to go there. While it’s true that algebra really isn’t necessary for college, colleges use success in advanced math as a convenient sorting mechanism. Besides, once we say algebra isn’t necessary, where do we stop? Literature? Biology? Chemistry? But without doubt, Hacker is right in part. Did I say that no one wants to go there? Or just hint it really, really loudly?
Examples: Dana Goldstein, Justin Baeder Iand II.

Voldemort Support:

Well, of course not everyone should take algebra, trig, or calculus. Or advanced literature. Or science. Not everyone has the cognitive ability or the interest. We should have a richer and more flexible curriculum, allowing anyone with the interest to take whatever classes they like with the understanding that not all choices lead to college and that outcomes probably won’t have the racial distributions we’d all prefer to see. Oh, and while we’re at it, we should be reviewing our immigration policies because it’s pretty clear that our country doesn’t need cheap labor right now.

Hacker, Outraged Opposition and Judicious Analysis to Voldemort Support:

SHUT UP, RACIST!

So really, what else is left to say? The Judicious Analysis essays I linked above were the strongest by far, particularly Justin Baeder II.

Instead, I’m going to revisit a chart I updated from the last time I posted it:

These are California’s math scores by grade and subject, the percentage scoring basic/proficient or higher on the CST. Algebra entry points differ, so the two higher (and slightly longer) of the four short lines are the percentages of “advanced” students with those scores—those who took algebra in 7th or 8th grade. The lower, shortest lines represent the scores of students who began algebra in 9th grade.

Notice that advanced students don’t match the performance of the entire elementary school population through 5th grade. Notice, too, that the percentage of advanced students scoring proficient or higher is just around half of the population. When I just considered algebra students who began in 8th grade (see link above), the percentage never tops 50. Notice that around 40% of the kids who started algebra in 9th grade achieved basic or higher.

NAEP scores show the same thing—4th grade math scores have risen, while 12th grade scores stay flat. In fact, Daniel Willingham, who declares above that we’re doing a bad job at teaching elementary math, was considerably more sanguine about teacher quality back in December, citing the improved elementary school math performance shown in the NAEP. So the strong elementary school performance, coupled with a huge dropoff in advanced math, is not unique to California.

These numbers, on the surface, don’t support the conventional wisdom about math performance: namely, that elementary school teachers need improvement and that the seeds of our students’ failure in higher math starts in the lower grades. Elementary students are doing quite well. It’s only in advanced math, when the teachers are much more knowledgeable, with higher SAT scores and tougher credentialling tests, that student performance starts to decline dramatically.

What these numbers do suggest is that as math gets harder, fewer and fewer students achieve mastery, or anything near it. . What they suggest, really, is that math knowledge doesn’t advance in a linear fashion. Shocking news, I know. We have all forgotten the Great Wisdom of Barbie.

Break it down by race and the percentages vary, but not the pattern. I skipped Asians, because California tracks Asians by subcategory, and life’s too short. I’m going to go right out on a limb and predict that Asians did a bit better than whites.

(Note: I know it’s weird that in all cases, 9th graders in general math have nearly the same percentages as 9th graders in algebra, but it’s easily confirmed: whites, blacks, Hispanics).

Whites in the standard math track perform as well as advanced math blacks and just a bit worse than advanced track Hispanics. Sixty to seventy percent of blacks and Hispanics on the standard track fail to achieve a “basic” score.

Some people are wondering how poverty affects these results, I’m sure. Let’s check.

Hey! Look at that! The achievement gap disappears!

Just kidding. This chart shows the results of blacks and Hispanics who are NOT economically disadvantaged and whites who ARE economically disadvantaged. You can see it on the legend.

So that’s how to make the achievement gap disappear: compare low income whites to middle class or higher blacks and Hispanics and hey, presto.

And that’s all the charts for today. I’m not detail-oriented, and massaged this all in Excel. You can do your own noodling here. Let me know if I made any major errors. The 2012 results should be out in a couple weeks.

Anyway. With numbers like these, it’s hard not to just see this entire debate as insanely pointless. In California, at least, tens of thousands of high school kids are sitting in math classes that they don’t understand, feeling useless, understanding deep in their bones that education has nothing to offer them. Meanwhile, well-meaning people who have never spent an hour of their lives trying to explain advanced math concepts to the lower to middle section of the cognitive scale pontificate about teacher ability, statistics vs. algebra, college for everyone, and other useless fantasies that they are allowed to engage in because until our low performers represent the wide diversity of our country to perfection, no one’s going to ruin a career by pointing out that this a pipe dream. And of course, while they’re engaging in these fantasies, they’ll blame teachers, or poverty, or curriculum, or parents, or the kids, for the fact that their dreams aren’t reality.

If we could just get whites and Asians to do a lot worse, no one would argue about the absurdity of sending everyone to college.

Until then, everyone will divert themselves by engaging in this debate—which, like many kids stuck in the hell of unfair expectations, will go nowhere.

Learning Math

Jessica Lahey’s In Defense of Algebra, in which she describes her adult triumph over math, reminded me of my own experiences learning math and how they might be relevant. This is long, but if I make what I did sound too easy, people will get the wrong idea.

I struggled in math during high school, but was simply too clueless to quit. I got As and Bs algebra in 8th grade, got Cs and Ds in the subsequent courses until senior year, when I held onto a B the entire year in AP Calculus and, in what remains one of the great academic shockers of my life, passed the AP Calc test with a 3. Many years later, I took the GRE for my first master’s. I spent a month slogging through math, relearning enough of it to get by, and was very pleased with my 650 quant score, which was the 65th percentile on the GRE. Good, but not great, which is pretty much how I did on the SAT many years earlier. (Verbal, which I spent no time on, was 790).

My math turnaround began after I started grad school, when my son was failing geometry. After reading his book and working dozens of problems, I was able to help him (he went on to pass both the AP Stats and Calc AB tests, and is stronger in college math than I am). Needing a part time job for grad school, I auditioned for a job at Kaplan.

I originally hired on to teach GRE classes, but within a month I was working close to 40 hours a week teaching the high school tests. Two months later, I was teaching Math 1c and Math 2c, which was ridiculous. I had to learn the SAT math by rote at first, and the SAT Subject math tests required trig and second year algebra. I protested to no avail, and my manager’s decision was prescient—within a few months, parents were emailing me for private homework tutoring in high school math. It turns out I’m very good at explaining things; when I didn’t know how to do a problem in the early days, which was often, I’d go look it up or ask a student who did understand the problem. Ah, that’s the part I missed! Anyone else do that? I could see students nodding. I made the process very transparent, showed students where the glitches in my comprehension were, helped them find their own glitches and, it turns out, students would rather be tutored by someone who knows where the understanding glitches are.

I told parents I didn’t have a clue what a log was if it wasn’t in an Ingalls story, but even after raising my rates as an attempt to scare them off, I was getting lots of work. Still, for my own peace of mind, I decided I needed to learn more math instead of literally learning it while teaching others.

I started with test math, my strength. The REA and Kaplan test prep books served as my educational foundation. Between the two books, I learned how to recognize the subject and how to solve a number of common problems. When I was tutoring students, I would recognize the type of problem it was. Then, using their textbook, I’d help them work problems by example and explain. In explaining the math, I learned a great deal. My students learned and got improved grades, more confidence, and better test scores. Me, I kept getting more clients.

After four years of this, I had an excellent understanding of high school math through pre-calc, and routinely scored 800 when taking practice Math 2c tests (which I did for the first few years to keep me alert to weak spots). I not only knew the material cold, for the most part, but was by this point extremely familiar with the curriculum and sequencing for pre-algebra through algebra II/trig, and somewhat familiar with the same for math analysis (pre-calc) and calculus.

Seven years after my first GRE and untold decades after high school, I aced two of the three teacher math credential tests, and passed the third, in calc, with what can be called a gentleman’s C—the conceptual questions, the trig and the math history questions pulled me through. I scheduled my ed school GRE with two days’ lead, and got an 800 on the quant—by that time I was getting 800s on the practice test without a pencil, sitting around the Kaplan office with 15 minutes to kill. (Verbal: 780, but I was distracted and finished in 12 minutes.)

As I was studying for the calc credential test (which I took twice), I suddenly had an epiphany about why I was now able to learn math, when I’d done so poorly in high school, and for this, boys and girls, I must go back even further, back to the dark old ages of the mainframe and the earliest days of my previous career:

I was unfocused after college, having done well in English lit classes and nothing else. I started as a data entry clerk, but got a contract at IBM using a mainframe product that everyone in its customer base hated, but had to use. While entering the data, I noticed a few short cuts, asked for a manual, and began customizing the product in ways very few people knew was possible. The boss was impressed and made me responsible for product demonstrations, showing my work and explaining how the product could be customized. I got a job from one of the companies that came to the demo, a major brokerage firm. It was my first real job after five years of temping in admin jobs, during and after college. (Irony alert: I’d taken, and nearly flunked, one computer programming course in college and was convinced it wasn’t the career for me. I was three years into my new job before I felt comfortable saying I was an applications programmer, much less a computer programmer.)

And the first day I got to my new job, my boss said to me, “So I need to put you on a different project first. Our systems management application needs to be installed on the NYC machine.We have this automated process that moves the source code out of Panvalet, automatically builds the compile JCL based on the program—you know, if it’s CICS or batch, IDMS or DB2, and so on, and compiles it, linkrefs it, and installs it in the right library. It’s already working here; you just need to transfer all the code, change the libraries, and so on. You know CICS, right?”

“No.”

“Oh, it’s a transaction server environment. We mostly use COBOL here, but we’ve got some assembler routines. You know COBOL or assembler? No problem, I’ll sign you up for a class. The code itself is mostly ISPF calls with EXEC, although I’d like to upgrade to REXX.”

It’s not just that I didn’t know COBOL, and had no idea what CICS was. It’s that I didn’t know what compile meant, or source code, or batch, or JCL, much less IDMS or DB2. And I didn’t have the foggiest clue what REXX or EXEC was, and ISPF to me was an application, not something I programmed with.

Baby, I brought that motherf***er in on time. Two and a half months. I got a bonus, too, because by the time it went live, my director had figured out a small fraction of how much I didn’t know, and was extremely impressed. She never grasped the sum total of my ignorance, thank god. Nor did she ever realize that I still didn’t know what the difference between CICS and batch was and didn’t realize that (at the time) a program couldn’t be both, only vaguely understood that “compile” meant translating code I could read into weird symbols I couldn’t read but presumably the computer could, never did learn COBOL, and only vaguely understood what JCL was or what it did. All that was in my future. The only thing I was pretty confident about after those two and a half months was that I was pretty darn good at EXEC and ISPF dialogs, and that these things weren’t what the brokerage products ran on.

So my epiphany was this: Working with computers had taught me how I learned. How I learned. Which was not like most people. When books don’t work as a learning tool, then I have to learn by a particular type of doing. Explanations won’t help. Learning in a vacuum won’t help. I need to learn by trial and error. And then, I learn like Wile E. Coyote traverses the desert; I just keep on going until something blows up in my face. Go this way? Boom! Okay, that way doesn’t work. File it away. Go that way? Two steps, yes, then BOOM! Okay, the two steps, file away, then don’t go that way because BOOM! how about this way? Tiptoe, tiptoe, try this, ha! It worked! Done. On to the next. Make sense of the chaos, bit by bit, understanding the rules by the reaction.

When I’m learning something, I neither know nor care about why. Understanding will usually come. So just as I ultimately understood CICS only several months after I started making changes to a mission critical CICS transaction, I didn’t bother with understanding what, exactly, trigonometry was. Two years after I first learned how to work trig problems, I read that trigonometry was the study of the ratio of right triangle sides, and I was like Holy Crap, that’s exactly what trig is. What a trip. One day soon I’ll internalize the fundamental theorem of algebra, but give me time. If not, I’ll wave the dead chicken over the problem because that’s what worked the last time. And it usually works again. (Note: Ironically, as a math teacher, I am big on explaining why, but that’s because I’ve realized that most people aren’t like me.)

Of course, theory, whether it be math or computers, is usually beyond me. And yet, in both math and computers, I am capable of occasional insights that please actual mathematicians and computer scientists, even though most of the time I don’t care, as they are working on things that I find utterly incomprehensible.

Why did I struggle with math in high school? The usual reasons don’t apply. I was an A student, and remained one in English and history. Unlike Jessica, I never felt labelled, nor did I give up. I had excellent math teachers, all of whom knew that my intellect was considerable and took the time to reach out—each one sat me down at some point and asked why I wasn’t doing better, given my obvious brains.

I just know that some people are going to read my post, as they read Jessica Lahey’s, and conclude that, by golly, we prove that anyone can learn math, and that labelling kids based on early progress is cruel and wrong and demoralizing. Lahey herself clearly holds this position.

Well, no. Lahey and I are both extremely bright and I know I say this a lot, but that’s because people persist in ignoring the relationship between “smart” and “academic achievement”. Lahey clearly has excellent verbal skills, strong at writing and foreign language (she’s a Latin teacher at an elite middle school), whereas I’m a hybrid who, in addition to excellent verbal skills, tested high on every computer aptitude test that came out back when I was in college. On the other hand, I can’t speak any foreign languages, and I suspect Lahey isn’t as strong on logic and pattern recognition, which is why she needed an algebra teacher to get through first year algebra, whereas I self-taught myself the entire high school curriculum.

What Lahey and I both demonstrate is that it’s possible to be well above average in smarts, yet still struggle in math when later experience proves that we were entirely capable of grasping it.

Why, then, does an otherwise smart person struggle with math?

I have a theory, involving my layman’s understanding of IQ, which I’ll go into briefly.

Two visual aids to categorizing or measuring intelligence: Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale subscores and subtests and Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory. In both, you can see what most people know on a casual level: intelligence has a verbal component and a visual/spatial component (known as performance in Wechsler). Logic seems to cut across the categories. It’s not terribly controversial to point out that advanced math, even that found in high school, requires more visual spatial and logic ability. I don’t know, specifically, how my intelligence maps to these categories. But I’ve always known that my verbal abilities were very high, my pattern recognition and decision processing equally so, and my visual-spatial relatively weak.

Imagine smart kids who has really strong verbal skills but unknown weaknesses in either logic or visual spatial abilities. These kids would coast easily through elementary school, where the skills needed are almost exclusively verbal—reading and arithmetic. By the end of of 8th grade, they’re bored out of their minds. Most of elementary school is time spent teaching them things they already know and developing social skills.

So for 8 years, this type of smart kid hadn’t ever had to struggle to learn something—in fact, learning itself is pretty alien to smart kids. (This, parents of smart kids, is why you should make sure your kids have to struggle with something—cooking, art, horseback riding, making nice with other people, whatever.)

And then, math. Algebra and beyond can come as a big shock. When school has come easily all your life, it’s hard to even know what “learning” is, much less how it applies to you. I’ve talked to countless people who qualify as Really, Really Smart, and every one of them has agreed that at some point in their lives, they realized that they had no idea how to learn. Some figured it out in high school or college. Some, like me, didn’t figure it out until they got a job that required them to learn something. Others, like Lahey, had access to a math teacher and went back and learned it because they wanted to fill in a gap that they felt was necessary for parenting.

So the otherwise smart kids who struggled with math did so in part because their particular intelligence was strong on verbal, and lighter on the spatial and (probably) visualization skills that are helpful in math. Plus, math was, to quote the Great Barbie, tough. And these kids had never once faced “tough” in a school subject. Many folded.

This was particularly true in the era before we began demanding higher math of all students (say about a decade or fifteen years ago). Before the 90s, math teachers weren’t held responsible for their students’ failures, and we accepted that not everyone was “good at math”. Kids with strong verbal abilities just took less math—in those days, it didn’t end your hopes of college, even of elite college. It was quite normal to get into an excellent school with a strong performance in history or English with little more than second year algebra on a transcript.

Today, of course, any white or Asian kid who wants to go to an elite college has to have advanced math, so the smart verbal kids who don’t have the requisite math skills have a much stronger incentive to either compensate or fake it, with or without a tutor. Moreover, math teachers these days are far more likely to reward effort over ability, so it’s easier for a student to get As in math by religiously doing homework and extra credit, even if they do poorly on tests. And of course, math teachers are also less likely to dismiss the effort involved in teaching math to those who aren’t necessarily strong in the subject. Thus, for many reasons, smart kids today with primarily verbal skills are less likely to have given up on math and are at least willing to fake it. Many learn to compensate, as I did much later in life, by using their other cognitive abilities to make up for their relative weakness.

(Compensation: Picture a circle inscribed in a square. Can you estimate the ratio of the circle’s area to the square’s? Or would you, like me, be completely incapable of a reliable guess and so calculate the difference by creating a radius of length r and work it as an algebra problem? I contend that people who can make an accurate estimate and do the algebra have an easier time in math than the people who can only do it with the algebra.)

Back in the day, the kids whose intelligence was strong in the math aspects but weak in verbal got a similar shock when they were expected to write an analytical essay on Hamlet and offer some original insights. Unfortunately, as has been noted before, our history and English curriculum has never recovered from the dumbing down it suffered through in the interests of multi-culti, giving kids who are strong at math little reason to ever struggle to access their verbal abilities.

This has obvious implications for the big algebra controversy kicked off by Hacker. But it involves recognizing that underlying cognitive ability is a huge determinant when deciding who should, or perhaps shouldn’t, take algebra.